Hostile friendships: Dynamics of care and conflict between migrant women in Chile

Friendships between low-wage migrant workers can provide mutual support and information, as well as generate suspicion, jealousy, and competition. Indonesian and Filipino migrant women in Chile maintain counter-intuitive social relations where, despite never fully resolving ongoing conflicts over money, men, or reputations, women continue to attend to new emergencies and provide significant economic, practical, or emotional support to one another. Such friendships take on a hostile quality, where women can be aggressive or antagonistic while caring for the other's needs. These friendships that endure despite open wounds raise questions about the nature of care and obligation in contemporary urban nonkin relations. They highlight how women affectively navigate the potential harm of friendship to survive structural and everyday violence from other social relations. In decentering the role of positive affect in analyses of friendship and caring relations, I propose that a focus on such “ambivalent relationality” can present us with more realistic, although perhaps unromantic, models of how to care for one another in an imperfect world.